Schiff responds to revelation of Trump Jr. meeting

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Burbank) held a press conference at Capitol Hill on Tuesday to address a meeting that occurred last summer between Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer with ties to the Kremlin.

“We now know that the response the president’s son gave to the Russians was that he would ‘love it’ if they would provide damaging information about Hillary Clinton,” Schiff said. “Rather than report this overture by the Russian government to provide damaging information to intervene in the presidential election in a way to help his father, neither the president’s son nor the campaign reported this information to the FBI.”

An email to Trump Jr. from Rob Goldstone, a British tabloid reporter, offered to connect the president’s son with a Russian official who had “information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father.”

Trump Jr., who posted the email thread to his Twitter account, responded, “… if it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer.”

Schiff called the exchange, and the subsequent meeting, “very significant, deeply disturbing new public information about direct contacts between the Russian government and its intermediaries, and the very center of the Trump family, campaign, and organization.”

“Obviously we need to get to the bottom of exactly what happened, what was said in that meeting, any of the information that went into organizing that meeting, as well as if that meeting was just the beginning, or that was a testing of the waters by the Russians to see whether the campaign would be receptive to their engagement and involvement in the presidential election,” he continued.

Trump Jr. released a statement that said he thought the Russian official – Natalia Veselnitskaya, who is connected to the Kremlin, according to media reports – had political opposition research.

“I first wanted to just have a phone call but when that didn’t work out, they said the woman would be in New York and asked if I would meet,” he said. “I decided to take the meeting. The woman, as she has said publicly, was not a government official. And, as we have said, she had no information to provide and wanted to talk about adoption policy and the Magnitsky Act. To put this in context, this occurred before the current Russian fever was in vogue.”

But Schiff called the meeting a “key development.”

“Our work continues, so we are interviewing new witnesses each week, sometimes more than one each week,” he said. “We will be doing that until we get to the bottom of not only these additional facts but all the others that we’re exploring.”